


What's the ground like – beneath your feet?

by failsafe



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-24 02:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4902448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some thoughts about where she belongs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's the ground like – beneath your feet?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheeana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/gifts).



> Happy belated birthday, Sheeana! I love you a lot. <333 
> 
> This is supposed to be for Earthborn Shepard, but since I'm still in the early stages of playing I had to be super vague for certain kinds of implications about stuff I don't know yet. I really hope it is decent anyway. If not, I tried and many apologies.

Joining the Alliance had let Shepard leave the Earth behind. Years of finding her grounding through means of artificial gravity and on foreign worlds had let her walk away from memories of hunger, struggle, and impermanence. The thought that she had once been a teenager with cheekbones that were a little too sharp and eyes that were a little too keen on catching any opportunity to meet a need had started to seem like a dream.

That was until she started to lie awake and look back over the landscapes of those things she might have dreamt about, had she been able to sleep. War took it out of a person like nothing else did – made her sleep like a baby a lot of the time – but sometimes it took as much sleep as it forced back upon her. She thought it might have been peace, too, keeping her awake in the silence that was filled up with two separate but similar paces and sounds of respiration – her own and his.

Even that silence wasn't really silent. There was always a hum, always some mechanism working just beyond sight and deep below. Controls, systems, something to keep them all alive for now. Knowing that she had experienced nights on Earth, a lifetime ago, when the night sky had been nothing but a far off twinkle and means of escape and the air had been full of nothing but the sound of crickets and the occasional rattle of a vehicle coming to life – somehow it kept her awake when she knew that a turian she trusted with her life more than anyone and anything else was fast asleep beside her.

The first fight she remembered ever having on Earth had felt – at the time – every bit as desperate as the one they now face. Something about the lack of a fair trade, blood over bread money. The fight to survive had been smaller, much more personal then – but she had been on her own.

Beside her, Garrus's breath rattled in a way that seemed to indicate unrest. He settled again, but she wondered what it was he was dreaming about. She couldn't imagine the same scene having unfolded on Palaven, back before anyone knew that any of this would matter. Back before she had ever known she'd meet a turian, let alone sleep with one.

She remembered the first person she ever slept with. She remembered more a face and a kind word than a name or a story. She remembered the way it had lasted for just a few minutes but that the untangling from a dream that it might have done anything to keep them together had taken a few more days to unravel. She wondered if that was what was going to happen now, with Vakarian – if it was just a dream and taking a lot longer to end.

She didn't think so. She hoped not. Hope seemed like a stupid thing to lie awake thinking about when she needed to be preparing for the hopeless odds that were out there, everywhere, for them to face. Exhaustion tugged beneath her eyes, but consciousness clung long enough for her fingers to reach out and brush against what felt like an etching against Garrus's carapace at his shoulder. She didn't understand, even now, how he felt.

Maybe that was another reason for not wanting it to end yet. He felt more solid than any thought, any memory she still held of Earth. It was a dream, and he was real and alive and needed her more than any human she had ever met – those among her friends included. She did not know what it was like to see through turian eyes, to feel the warmth of touch through their hardened skin, defensive and ready for battles that her own did not know how to fight.

Around them, something aboard the Normandy hummed. The night was not silent, nor was it clean the way people liked to imagine still that fresh air could be. The most pure part of being here was what they breathed out, run through sets of lungs that were as alive here as they would be somewhere else, for now. Lying flat, staring at a metallic ceiling, fingers working like they knew how to read a language in his arm that she had never spoken, she remembered grass beneath her feet.

Not the kind of grass beneath her feet that fit in a dream. Not the crisscross and damp of skin to rich green strands that could tickle at bare skin. She remembered, instead, grass that was too long and unkempt, dry and yellow, dragging at boots as she ran from something, to anything away from there. She supposed that, for a human, there was something so old and not yet knew enough that imagined that if they ever set foot on Earth, they thought they would never leave. It was home to them, and it hadn't been long enough for it to become anywhere else.

But here on the Normandy, in the quiet and late in an arbitrary kind of night, she wondered if it might be that home was somewhere a long way away from loneliness, twinkling blue sky, and grass.


End file.
